A few weeks ago, two young artists, students, from Orange, California, sent us the single striking image above. It was created during one of the many collaborations between dancer and choreographer Zak Ryan Schlegel, and photographer and filmmaker Marie Hanhnhon Nguyen. They described it as “an experiment with flour and the kind of light that exists around dusk.” We loved it, and asked them for more. This is what they came back to us with with.

We create with a focal point. Our projects never really center around dance, nor art or image - they exist as a whole. And I think that that is what you and I are about, artistically. Making the human process through image and movement, lightness and darkness, feel. We are site specific in that we seek an environment that we can change by creating in it. This little creek area will presumably never see dance and film again, and that is a project in and of itself - changing the energy of the environment in which we create.

We are not necessarily out to make a statement as much as we just want to feel. Guiding the human eye into a new experience… We create work as temporary and obscure solutions to the puzzle of existing, because the moments we create make the most sense, feel the most emotionally accurate, and visually manifest our collective imagination the closest they possibly can, given the human possibility of artistic creation. - Zak and Marie

Existing has been the biggest challenge in my life because I don’t look at existing with an average eye. I deal with existence in my work primarily because it is the one thing that incessantly oppresses and frees me. Tantalizes and dejects. Lifts and drops me. Wonderfully tumultuous. This is the spirit of my natural impetus to move. I move with all of this weight. There is no absence of intention, because the intention is that there really is no intention. My mind is incapable of bracing these thoughts and therefore they must escape the body, through the body. The process of these thoughts escaping through the body is what I do. That is what I create and that is how I create. Existing through dance. Existing through movement. - Zak Schlegel

I create because there is no present, urgent alternative for me. No consequent negative stands. For sanity, joy and any other impressed extension of human vitals, I try to make art. As for the specific motivations behind each work, each justification is unique to each idea, each concept and each thought. I believe that moments continually possess a kinetic incentive, an essential affinity for change. For me, art has no static consequence. I change every day, so therefore what I make changes every day. I can only create from the indefinite. Pieces and concepts always come to me with their own unique structure. There are times when I make things erratically, and there are times when I have a heavy process. I create whatever comes to me with turbulent imperative. I usually work with visual mediums. As of now, Zak and I have been heavily collaborating on communicating movement based imagery. - Marie Nguyen